Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
The Onion does book reviews?
  

    

Yes, and record reviews and interviews and other features.  They hide them 
under the heading "AV Club" (I think).
  

    
It's live:

http://theonionavclub.com/avclub3907/words3907.html#review1
  

    

One of the highlights of my career to date was seeing a capsule preview of my
gig in the Madison ediition of The Onion.
  

    
That is some swell review! w00t!
  

    

very cool! Rocket, i had no idea you did stuff for the Onion. or did you
just somehow find a before-it's-published thingy for them? are you still
doing Angry Coffee?

colour me a topickal drifter... whups.
  

    
rocket's been at the onion for many moons now (with tears in his eyes, one 
suspects, from all the juice...)
  

    

Whuffie goin' up!
  

    
Yes, I work for The Onion (tough job offer to turn down). But Angry Coffee
is still alive and kicking. We make e-cards for musicians like Queens of
The Stone Age as well as corporate intrests like Soloflex and Tektronix.
My role is diminished, but I still take interesting phone calls from
Hollywood freaks.
  

    
You do get to do all the cool stuff, you know, Adam.
  

    
Hey, I hear you work with a bunch of freaks in Austin!
http://www.polycot.com/company/staff/
  

    
I'm signing and reading at the Booksmith in the Haight next Wednesday.
Looking forward to getting my own author trading card! Not sure what I'll
read there. A little bit of D&O, to be sure, but maybe some of Eastern
Standard Tribe or /usr/bin/god or Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves
Town.

Hope to see you all there!
  

    
Entertainment Weekly

March 7 issue, page 77

 Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom * Cory Doctorow (Tor, $22.95)

What better place to fantasize about our troubling evolutionary path than
Tomorrowland? Doctorow takes the scariest scientific advances -- cloning,
medical immortality, an inter-networked world in which social standing is
based on eBay-style ratings -- and sets them inside a Disney theme park.
More specifically, these techno-possibilities are the backdrop for a battle
over the Haunted Mansion. Members of the governing "Ad-hocracy" want to
preserve the attraction's animatronic innards, but a techno-populist team
from Disneyland Beijing has developed a way to flash-bake experiences
directly on visitors' brains. The resulting tug-of-war leads to on-line
insurrections, fan-led coups, and an assassination. The futuristic roller-
coaster that is *Down and Out* travels is more fascinating than the murder-
mystery at its core. Still, Doctorow's debut is a sci-fi ride worth lining
up for.

A-

-- Noah Robischon
  

    

nice, cory!!
  

    
A reminder! I am going to be reading from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
tonight at 7PM at the Booksmith in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury. I'll read
from D&O, and maybe from something else -- either the novel that's coming
next year or one of the novels that I'm working on at the moment. Booksmith
gives out free author trading-cards, and is a very swell bookstore in
general.

http://www.booksmith.com/
  

    
Fun!
  

    
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/books/review/009ANTRIT.html

'Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom': After the Advent of the
Bitchun Society By TAYLOR ANTRIM

Though Cory Doctorow's first novel takes place in Florida, its
amiable, laid-back utopia creates a distinctly California mood.
We begin ''sometime late-XXI'' after the rise of the ''Bitchun
Society.'' There is no more death, just a voluntary hibernation
called ''deadheading,'' and money has gone the way of
''Whuffie,'' your level of public capital or good will. Disney
World is run by ''ad-hocracy,'' loose organizations of young
people with cellphones implanted in their inner ears and
networked PC's wired to their brains. These ''castmembers'' work
together to improve the park through new technologies and
feel-good crowd management. One character, Keep A-Movin' Dan,
describes the vibe of the new social order: ''We can't remember
what it was like to work to earn our keep; to worry that there
might not be enough, that we might get sick or get hit by a
bus.'' Doctorow may be writing science fiction, but I'd call this
San Francisco circa 1999.

Wised-up dot-com veterans will very likely cotton to our hero,
Julius, whose 100-odd years have built in him an ambivalence to
some aspects of the Bitchun Society. He appreciates the lack of
death or scarcity, and yet he detects ''a slightly depressing
homogeneity to the world'' and finds an antagonist in Debra,
another castmember, who he suspects wants to ''tear down every
marvelous Rube Goldberg in the park and replace them with
pristine white sim boxes on giant, articulated servos.'' Julius
loves the animatronic robots, the dioramas and the mechanized
rides of the old-school attractions and hates the idea of Debra's
more synthetic, virtual Disney World. ''You don't want to be a
post-person,'' he tells Keep A-Movin' Dan. ''You want to stay
human. The rides are human.''

Julius is murdered under mysterious circumstances, and while he's
getting reborn into a ''force-grown'' clone, his brain restored
from a digitized backup, Debra and her ad-hocracy take over
Disney World's Hall of Presidents. They junk the hall's talking
robots for virtual Lincolns and Washingtons who ''flash-bake''
their stories directly onto your mind. Julius suspects Debra had
him killed to distract attention from her plan and rallies his
ad-hocracy of traditionalists around the much-loved,
old-fashioned Haunted Mansion, vowing to hold her off at any
cost.

Cory Doctorow is an avid Weblogger (he can be found at
boingboing.net), and his novel's ad-hocracies of ''twittering
Pollyannic castmembers'' who smoke ''decaf'' crack and
congratulate one another on ''Bitchun'' ideas offer a knowing,
gently satiric view of a once ascendant digital culture. And the
impressively imagined world of the novel is tricked out in lively
prose. In one particularly amusing section, Julius recalls an
ex-wife from space named Zed: ''We met in orbit, where I'd gone
to experience the famed low-gravity sybarites. Getting staggering
drunk is not much fun at one gee, but at ten to the neg eight,
it's a blast. You don't stagger, you bounce, and when you're
bouncing in a sphere full of other bouncing, happy, boisterous
naked people, things get deeply fun.'' Though she's around for
only a few pages, Zed is one of Doctorow's best inventions, a
''transhuman . . . with a bewildering array of third-party
enhancements: a vestigial tail, eyes that saw through most of the
R.F. spectrum, her arms, her fur, dogleg reversible knee joints
and a completely mechanical spine.'' Julius can't keep Zed's
interest, and their relationship ends on a sad note -- she
reverts to a backed-up version of her brain from the time before
they met.

While ''Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom'' can be a lot of
irreverent fun, it can also come off clumsy. Doctorow's ideas
animate the first half of the novel, but the human relationships
that push the story along fail to convince. Julius's girlfriend,
Lil, never comes to life; nor does the basis for Julius's loyalty
to Keep A-Movin' Dan. For some reason Dan and Lil have an affair
behind Julius's back, a plot turn that does little more than
inspire a few lazy cliches: ''I . . . saw Dan and Lil staring
into each other's eyes, a meaningful glance between new lovers,
and I saw red. Literally.'' Likewise, Julius's conflict with
Debra ultimately fails to provide any satisfying fireworks.
Nevertheless, Doctorow's slim, culturally acute novel is clever
and lousy with the kinds of ideas (wearable designer faces,
climate-control cowls, transdermal mood-balancers, telepresence
robots) sure to have attracted a few million in venture capital
-- you know, back in late-XX.

Taylor Antrim is a Henry Hoyns fellow in fiction writing at the
University of Virginia.
  

    
NYT review.  Bigtime--
  

    
and this is only his first!
  

    

Big big bigtime.
  

    
for those of you coming to this way late ( as I did ) you can find the onion
review at
http://www.theonionavclub.com/reviews/words/words_d/downandoutinthemagicking01
.html
  

    

Cory posted within the members-only part of The WELL in the <salon.>
conference but this is public info (and cool stuff!) so I thought I'd re-
brag on his behalf:

A story he wrote last year and published at Salon.com was just nominated for
a Nebula award!  Wowee.
  

    
It must be this one:
 http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/01/16/liberation_spectrum/
  

    
It was "Ownz0red" or however it's spelled.
  

    
Really?  I loved that but it was 2002, wasn't it?
Hmm...